CNN’s Jake Tapper expresses his love for the Eagles — and how he kept all the receipts
The lifelong Birds fan made sure to let all of the team’s critics know that they were wrong.
If the Eagles’ parade hadn’t taken place on Valentine’s Day, we may never have gotten Jake Tapper’s opening segment on The Lead, his daily show on CNN, eviscerating critics of Nick Sirianni, Jalen Hurts, and the Eagles.
“I would have taken the day off of work to go to the parade, but I could not have missed Valentine’s Day dinner without there being some serious repercussions,” Tapper said. “But I feel like I staked my flag in the ground pretty well.”
Instead, Tapper, a Philadelphia native and a lifelong Birds fan, called out everyone from Dan Orlovsky to Stephen A. Smith to Bill Simmons, for criticisms of the Birds dating back to Hurts’ draft day in 2020.
After taking in Super Bowl LIX in-person with his 15-year-old son, which Tapper described as a “top-five life experience,” he was inspired by TikToks exposing old Eagles takes, and wanted to put together a more formal segment to expose the naysayers.
“I had the preconceived belief that it had been us against the world, us in terms of Philly, against the world the whole season — since they brought Sirianni on,” Tapper said. “I was thinking about how sweet the victory was, and just burying myself in in Eagles Instagram Reels, I just thought about — this is one of the reasons why it’s so beautiful, because so many people have been trash talking and putting up impediments to the lives of these guys, whether it’s all the Jalen doubters or Saquon [Barkley] doubters or all of the individual stories.”
He turned to his Eagles fan friends for help, and one, who’d prefer to remain anonymous, stepped up and found the worst takes for the segment, which Tapper pieced together and wrote to open Friday’s show. Ultimately, he had to hold himself back a bit — you could write an hour-long special just dedicated to cashing receipts about this Eagles team.
Tapper has been experiencing the ups and downs with the Birds for decades, but he couldn’t recall a moment where the doubt and vitriol around the Eagles from outside was this intense.
“The fact that so many people had been telling this team that they were trash made the victory that much sweeter,” Tapper said. “It was specific to them. Nick Foles was obviously an underdog story, and the Eagles were the underdogs against the Patriots in 2018 and that was beautiful, but I just don’t remember the trash talking of the Eagles the way that I remember it [this year]. It vividly was a presence in my life.”
The win being as dominant as it was made it that much sweeter. Tapper and his father attended Super Bowl LII together in Minneapolis, and that game was close wire-to-wire. Having experienced a lifetime of Philly sports fandom, he didn’t enjoy the experience until after the game had already ended. Some of that same anxiety took hold for Super Bowl LIX, but as the Birds continued to dominate the game, it became more enjoyable — especially since the Eagles got revenge for Super Bowl LVII.
Seven years ago, for Super Bowl LII, Tapper’s son, Jack, then eight-years-old, wasn’t a big Eagles fan at all. Now, Tapper said his son is even more in tune with the NFL and with the Eagles than he is — but it took a little work, especially since the Tapper family lives in Washington D.C., and his wife, Jennifer, is from St. Joseph, Missouri, which is about an hour outside of Kansas City.
When Tapper first moved to DC decades ago, Washington was coming off three Super Bowl wins, and consistently at the top of the division, while the Eagles struggled. But during his son’s childhood, the Eagles have been consistently competitive — a far cry from the Eagles teams of his youth, making it easier to sell Jack on Eagles fandom.
“Since 2018, the Eagles have been in three Super Bowls, and won two of them,” Tapper said. “That was not my childhood experience at all. My dad is originally from Chicago, although he’s an Eagles fan now, and there was a period during high school where I also rooted for the Bears because the Eagles were so bad. I think that my son is getting an unrealistic view of what it’s like to be an Eagles fan.”
With his segment on The Lead, Tapper said he hoped he was speaking for all of Philadelphia, to everyone who’d counted the team out, to share why he and the city loved the team. For someone who spends far too much time thinking about the Eagles, and letting them impact his mood, Tapper said he’s still processing this turn of events.
“I could never have imagined growing up that the Eagles would be such a source of joy in my life,” Tapper said.